We are no longer getting a standalone $30 expansion to the insane open-world crime game Saint's Row: The Third this year, as publisher THQ, emboldened by a change in leadership has nixed the project in order to expand it into a full-sized new Saint's Row next year.

Remember that silly April Fool's joke from Saints Row the Third about the alien kidnapping the …
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"When I looked at the Enter The Dominatrix expansion in production at Volition, I was blown away by the ideas and desire to expand the fiction of the franchise... I asked the team what it could achieve given more time, more resources, and a broader scope for the project. We all agreed we wanted to play that game. When it comes to Saints Row, it's clear our fans want bigger, better, and even more over the top, and that's why Enter The Dominatrix will now be incorporated into a vastly expanded, full-fledged sequel, scheduled for calendar 2013."

We already knew that a Saint's Row 4 was in development. In fact, in May, Rubin's predecessor, Danny Bilson told Kotaku that the new game was shaping up well and was going to be more of the kind of game he'd like (it was unclear what that meant; The Third was as bawdy as its predecessors but proved to be less of the Grand Theft Auto wannabe of the first Saint's Row and more of its own thing: a surprisingly self-aware, creatively ambitious, fourth-wall-breaking, formally-experimental open-world crime game—with a tacky side mode called "Whored Mode").

With THQ recently dropping its delightful yet unprofitable kids' games in favor of working on…
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The new Saint's Row will be made by the series' long-time studio Volition, which also has created games in the Red Faction series and is supposed to be working on a planned trilogy of horror games called InSane with movie director Guillermo Del Toro. The fate of InSane, however, is itself in question as the game, which was announced in 2010, no-showed this year's E3.